Author Topic: London Spy: Ben Whishaw, dreamy lover/genius Ed Holcroft and sage Jim Broadbent  (Read 573394 times)

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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FYI:


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/17/books/Julian-Barness-Sense-of-an-Ending-Review.html

BOOKS OF THE TIMES

Life in Smoke and Mirrors
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
OCT. 16, 2011




If there is a single theme running throughout Julian Barnes’s work, from his 1985 masterpiece, “Flaubert’s Parrot,” to “A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters” (1989), “Love, Etc.,” and recent collections like “Pulse” (2011), it’s the elusiveness of truth, the subjectivity of memory, the relativity of all knowledge. While earlier books examined our limited ability to comprehend other people and other eras, his latest novel, “The Sense of an Ending” — which was shortlisted for this year’s Man Booker Prize (the winner will be announced Tuesday) [It did win, 2011 JG] — looks at the ways in which people distort or tailor the past in an effort to mythologize their own lives.

Much as his talented contemporary Kazuo Ishiguro did in “The Remains of the Day,” Mr. Barnes has used the device of the unreliable narrator — borrowed, it would seem, in both cases, from Ford Madox Ford’s classic, “The Good Soldier” — to explicate this phenomenon. Like some of Mr. Barnes’s earlier works of fiction “The Sense of an Ending” (the title has been lifted from a work of literary theory by the critic Frank Kermode) is dense with philosophical ideas and more clever than emotionally satisfying. Still, it manages to create genuine suspense as a sort of psychological detective story. We not only want to find out how Mr. Barnes’s narrator, Tony Webster, has rewritten his own history — and discover what actually happened some 40 years ago — but also understand why he has needed to do so.

Tony, now in his 60s, has persuaded himself he’s “achieved a state of peaceableness, even peacefulness,” though he never had any of the great adventures he once dreamed about having as a boy who hoped life might resemble the books he loved. Tony’s account of his youth — delivered in the first half of the novel — emphasizes the awkwardness and repression he and his high school friends experienced when it came to girls: “But wasn’t this the ’60s? Yes, but only for some people, only in certain parts” of England.

At this point Tony’s reminiscences seem pretty straightforward. As Tony recalls it, he looked up to a new boy in his school named Adrian Finn as a “truth-seeker” and model of intellectual sophistication. The brilliant, Camus-reading Adrian went off to Cambridge, Tony to a less distinguished university, where he became involved with an enigmatic woman named Veronica Ford; after Tony and Veronica’s affair came to an abrupt end, Adrian wrote Tony asking for his permission to go out with Veronica. Then, suddenly, at 22, Adrian committed suicide, leaving a note about his philosophical decision to choose death over life.

As for Tony, he went on to work as an arts administrator, married a sensible woman named Margaret, had a daughter named Susie, and after a dozen years got an amicable divorce. He says he admires Adrian for having the courage to act on his convictions, whereas he, Tony, chose tidiness and safety: “I recycle; I clean and decorate my flat to keep up its value. I’ve made my will; and my dealings with my daughter, son-in-law, grandchildren and ex-wife are, if less than perfect, at least settled.”

This dull life, Mr. Barnes suggests, is rocked to its core when Tony receives a mysterious letter from a law firm informing him that one Sarah Ford — Veronica’s mother, it turns out, whom he met briefly one weekend decades ago — has left him something in her will: a bequest of £500 and, weirdly, Adrian’s diary, which somehow came into her possession. When Tony tries to take ownership of the diary, he learns that Veronica is reluctant to turn it over — all of which leads to a series of cryptic exchanges with Veronica that leave him questioning his own feelings about her, and, for that matter, the veracity of all that happened so many decades ago.

To what degree has Tony deluded us — and himself — with his simplistic account of the love triangle among himself, Veronica and Adrian? Has he romanticized Adrian’s suicide, or has Adrian himself used philosophy as a rationalization for an act motivated by darker, more desperate impulses? Is Veronica to blame for Adrian’s death, or is she some sort of victim?

In raising these questions Mr. Barnes has Tony survey the receding vistas of his life, raising many of the same issues — regarding age, time and mortality — that he’s explored with more heartfelt emotion in recent books like “Pulse” and “The Lemon Table” (2004). In the end there is something vaguely condescending about the author’s portrait of Tony, who is presented as such a myopic and passive-aggressive twit that the reader finds it hard not to be annoyed with him. Mr. Barnes also concludes Tony’s story with a violent twist that feels more like a narrative contrivance than an inevitable revealing.

Mr. Barnes does an agile job, however, of unpeeling the onion layers of his hero’s life while showing how Tony has sliced and diced his past in order to create a self he can live with. In doing so Mr. Barnes underscores the ways people try to erase or edit their youthful follies and disappointments, converting actual events into anecdotes, and those anecdotes into a narrative.

“It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age,” Tony says, “when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.”


THE SENSE OF AN ENDING
A Novel
By Julian Barnes
163 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $23.95.




Julian Barnes


« Last Edit: March 09, 2017, 09:52:02 pm by Aloysius J. Gleek »
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Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Now this one sounds promising!  :D



http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-sense-of-an-ending-review-20170309-story.html


Jim Broadbent
elevates a time-bending story in

The Sense of an Ending
by Justin Chang
Contact Reporter
Film Critic


March 9, 2017 10:35AM


Jim Broadbent and Harriet Walter in the film “The Sense of an Ending.”
(Robert Viglasky / CBS Films / Lionsgate)





"I'm great believer in time’s revenge.” The words are spoken late in “The Sense of an Ending,” though it might be just as accurate to say that they are spoken early.

In the grand, somewhat dubious tradition of movies where the wounds of the past bleed heavily into the present, this genteel British puzzle-box of a movie leaps deftly back and forth in time, bridging the gap between an old man’s present-day existence and his lively 1960s school days.

The older version of Tony Webster (an excellent Jim Broadbent) has lived a mostly quiet, ordinary life. He spends most of his days behind the counter of a small vintage camera shop, when he’s not testing the patience of his loyal ex-wife, Margaret (Harriet Walter), and their tough-minded daughter, Susie (Michelle Dockery), who is about to give birth to her first child.

But one day Tony receives word of the death of an older acquaintance, Sarah Ford, who has unexpectedly bequeathed to him a relic from the past — one that Veronica Ford, Sarah’s daughter and Tony’s former girlfriend, refuses to surrender. The legal and emotional complications that ensue trigger a sudden flood of painful and overwhelming memories, implicating Tony anew in a tragedy that he has never come to terms with. (The younger version of Tony is played with fresh-faced, ginger-headed appeal by Billy Howle.)

The notion of time’s revenge is thus easy enough to decipher, even as it carries with it a secondary interpretation that the filmmakers probably didn’t intend. No artistic medium can manipulate time more quickly or adroitly than cinema, but that ease of movement, if not properly earned or motivated, can quickly turn cheap and facile — a triumph of match cuts over meaning. And “The Sense of an Ending,” despite its polished construction and immaculate pedigree, doesn’t ultimately mean as much as it thinks it does.

Directed by Ritesh Batra (“The Lunchbox”) from a screenplay by Nick Payne, the film offers a skillful and elegant dilution of Julian Barnes’ 2011 Man Booker Prize-winning novel, which had the patience and tonal assurance to tell its two-part story from start to finish. Batra and Payne, in the interests of delivering a film that is both visually varied and rhythmically interesting, have little recourse but to play chronological hopscotch, a strategy that winds up calling undue attention to its own cleverness: Every dramatic payoff is applauded, every thematic echo vigorously underlined.

You can’t entirely begrudge “The Sense of an Ending” its self-satisfaction. Like the secondhand Leica cameras Tony sells in his shop, it’s a charming and meticulous piece of engineering. The evocation of Tony’s youth, a period of amusing academic mischief and (up to a point) carefree romantic ardor, is transporting enough, even if it falls short of the novel’s intellectual playfulness and intensity of feeling.

The dialogue purrs along elegantly, spoken by some of the finest British actors working today, who are all good at infusing even their more artificial moments with a rich suggestion of inner life. This is true even when some of the performers — chiefly Matthew Goode as Tony’s coolly exasperated history teacher and Emily Mortimer as a young, fetching version of Sarah — seem bizarrely overqualified for their roles.

A more satisfying match of actor and role is achieved by Charlotte Rampling, bringing her usual steely self-possession to bear on Veronica, who makes a startling return to Tony’s life after a decades-long silence. She’s played in flashback by the suitably bewitching Freya Mevor, while Joe Alwyn, the underrated young star of “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk,” makes a superb impression as Adrian Finn, a brooding, philosophizing student who turned Tony and Veronica’s relationship into a triangle.

But the movie is ultimately Broadbent’s showcase, and he shoulders the dramatic burden with sly, curmudgeonly expertise. He wisely doesn’t soft-pedal the fact that, even before his dark secret comes tumbling out, Tony Webster seems like a pretty lousy fellow: monstrously self-absorbed, indifferent to the feelings of others, and prone to fits of impulsive, irrational behavior.

And the lingering frustration of “The Sense of an Ending,” apart from its overly mechanical plotting, is that it finally seems content to coddle and indulge Tony more than it challenges him. There’s a whiff of Ian McEwan’s “Atonement” to Barnes’ story, which similarly deals with the consequences of an ill-advised act of youthful spite, the difficulty of making amends, and above all the tidy, comforting narratives we spin for ourselves in an attempt to supply clarity, meaning and closure where none exists.

These themes are all present and accounted for in the film, but they are also more emphatically stated than deeply felt. Tony’s guilt and anguish are resolved in a sudden welter of reassuring music and equally reassuring voice-over. You sense the ending coming a long way off, but catharsis remains out of reach.



‘The Sense of an Ending’

Director Ritesh Batra
Writers Julian Barnes, Nick Payne

Cast: Jim Broadbent, Charlotte Rampling, Harriet Walter, Michelle Dockery, Matthew Goode, Emily Mortimer, James Wilby, Edward Holcroft, Billy Howle, Freya Mavor, Joe Alwyn, Peter Wight. Hilton McRae, Jack Loxton, Timothy Innes, Andrew Buckle

Rating: PG-13, for thematic elements, a violent image, sexuality and brief strong language
Running time: 1 hour, 48 minutes.
Playing: ArcLight Cinemas, Hollywood; the Landmark Theatre, West Los Angeles

"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


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Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/apr/01/julian-barnes-i-told-the-film-makers-to-throw-my-book-against-a-wall-




Film adaptations
Julian Barnes
'I told the film-makers to throw my book against a wall'
Ahead of the film version of of Barnes’s Man Booker-winning novel The Sense of an Ending
he explains why he asked the film-makers to be brutal with his text.



by Xan Brooks
@XanBrooks

Saturday 1 April 2017 07.00 EDT



The fallibility of memory … Charlotte Rampling and Jim Broadbent as Veronica and Tony in The Sense of an Ending
Photograph: Everett Collection/Alamy Stock Photo




The Sense of an Ending is a short, sharp novel about a man who tells his own story and then comes to doubt it. Written by Julian Barnes, it’s a book in two halves (construction; deconstruction) as ageing Tony Webster is forced to revise his account in the light of complicating new evidence and unquiet old memories. “How often do we tell our own life story?” Tony wonders. “How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts?” Our history, he concludes, is merely the story we tell. Others spin their own versions and the truth is elusive.

Now, six years after it won the Man Booker prize, The Sense of an Ending is being told again, courtesy of a plush new BBC Films adaptation. Or, to put it less charitably, Barnes has lost control of his story. His prose has been adjusted and embellished. Sly cuts have been made. Given the book’s subject matter, this seems rather fitting.

One spring afternoon, I visit Barnes in his north London home. Tea and polenta cake have been set out on the table. In person, the author is cerebral and exacting (which I had expected) and prone to explosive giggles (which I had not). He laughs when he recalls reading an early draft of the script that didn’t appear to contain a single line of his original dialogue. He’d urged the film-makers to betray him. They took him at his word.

“But then I don’t think a writer should sit on the shoulders of the director,” he insists. “They’re not making a memorial. They’re making something for an art form that has its own aesthetic and set of rules. So they should throw my book against the wall, pick up the pieces and then put them together in a different way.”

On balance, I’m in favour of faithless adaptations: ones that set about their subject matter like creative vandals, freestyle and irreverent. I like what Stanley Kubrick did with Lolita and The Shining. I even like the especially woolly affairs: Spike Jonze’s weird extrapolation of Where the Wild Things Are or Wes Anderson’s skittish take on Fantastic Mr Fox. Surely the text is just a blueprint, whether it was written by a studio hack or James Joyce. And surely the respective mediums communicate in different ways (movies show and books tell). Besides, in the case of Barnes’s novel, what alternative was there? The Sense of an Ending  gives us the interior monologue of an unreliable narrator. It folds the past with the present; it’s about the fallibility of memory. The material appears expressly designed to thwart a straight film conversion.




Billy Howle and Freya Mayor as the young Tony and Veronica in The Sense of an Ending.



The film is directed by Ritesh Batra and scripted by the playwright Nick Payne. It shuffles present-day action with 1960s flashbacks as retired, peaceable Tony Webster (Jim Broadbent) revisits his relationship with Veronica (Charlotte Rampling), an ex-lover whose significance he has sought to downplay and dismiss. Purists should note that the bones of the story remain largely the same. But changes have been made and these steer Barnes’s narrative along a slightly sunnier path. The book memorably concluded in a state of disarray, with Tony stripped bare. Its closing line was, “There is great unrest”. The film, by contrast, bows out with new life, fresh hope, an implied spiritual rebirth. The Sense of an Ending, in short, changes the damn ending.

“Yes, the tone of the film is more positive,” Barnes says. “The ending, certainly, is much more optimistic. I think that’s down to the nature of cinema as opposed to literature. But it’s also because it was made by men who are much younger than me. Ritesh is in his 30s. Nick Payne is, too. And the young are more optimistic than the old.”

Books speak one language; films another. The novel, perhaps, is fundamentally subjective and introverted (written by one person to be read by another). Whereas cinema at least purports to be objective and extrovert – to show things as they are and to speak to people en masse. This naturally shapes the type of stories they like to tell.

“It seems to me that truthful fiction often ends ambivalently or pessimistically,” Barnes says. “Film, on the whole, likes to give a clear answer, a clear ending. And films believe in this awful thing: redemption. I don’t believe in redemption and would never write a book where the character is redeemed.”

He thinks this through, prodding at his cake. “Literature will always exist and thrive, because no other art form captures the inner life – the soul, the heart, the mind – so well as the novel. But I do like the way cinema cuts between past and present. A visual flashback is so much more emotional and powerful than a prose flashback. But look, we have to give film some advantages over the novel. They do a much better car chase.” He laughs at the image and returns to his cake. He says, “I really must write a car chase one day.”

When embarking on a screen adaptation, Jim Broadbent is always at pains to read the source novel first. “It solves all your research in one blast,” he says. “If Dickens tells you what the character looks like and sounds like, you think, ‘OK, I’ll go with that.’” He had read Nicholas Nickleby  years before he made the film. It was a similar deal with the adaptation of Cloud Atlas. “And then when I did Vanity Fair, it was an excuse to read a classic novel I had somehow never got around to reading in the past.”

True to form, Broadbent studied The Sense of an Ending before receiving the script. He loved the book and he loved Tony, too. He found himself identifying with the character’s struggles, his vulnerability, his rampant self-delusion. So he relished playing the part. “Except that then, of course, there’s always a fair bit of regret. You sit down and think, ‘Oh, I wish they kept that bit in,’ only because I loved the book.” Broadbent sighs. “I was all for keeping the film as pessimistic as possible. But you have to remind yourself that the film’s not the book. If you try to be faithful, you’re always going to fail.”

By now, I’m starting to view the whole process as a series of betrayals. Or a relay-race of loyalties; or competing versions of the truth. Payne explains that The Sense of an Ending was his first movie script. That made him the crew’s least experienced member. He tells me his initial loyalty was to Barnes. After that it shifted to the producers – his paymasters – and then finally to the director. “I watch the finished version and see pieces of me in it,” he says. “But it’s definitely Ritesh’s film.”

Payne is best known for his play Constellations, a glorious two-hander that opened at London’s Royal Court in 2012. He was first drawn to Barnes’s novel because it reminded him of Nicolas Roeg films such as Bad Timing or Don’t Look Now  in the way it plays with memory and time. But he thinks the material is malleable, and that that is surely part of the point. “Why even make a film if the ultimate aim is to render it as a Xerox of the novel?” he says. “It has to work on screen first and foremost. Otherwise stick with the book.”

I mention the film’s upbeat ending and Payne barks a short laugh. He asks whether I have spoken to the director and I tell him I haven’t. “Speak to Ritesh,” he advises. “I have to be careful here. Yes, maybe the ending is partly down to me being that bit more romantic than Julian. Maybe there’s a commercial pressure there too. But in an ideal world I’d have wanted the ending left hanging, everything left in limbo. I wrote a slightly different ending, let’s put it that way. Ask Ritesh about the ending.”

Ritesh Batra is an Indian film-maker, recently gone global. In 2013, he scored a break-out hit with The Lunchbox, a gorgeous, lovelorn, Brief Encounter-style tale that charted the chaste relationship between an office drone and an unhappy housewife. The Lunchbox, he says, came from a primal place. But The Sense of an Ending was personal, too. Specifically, the book stirred memories of the years he spent as a child, sharing a bedroom with his elderly grandfather. “I’d sit up at night listening to him talking about his life and his regrets and who was to blame. These people were dead but they still mattered to him, still existed for him. He was still fighting old battles.” The character of Tony reminded him of his grandfather.




Harmonious relationships … screenwriter Nick Payne with the director, Ritesh Batra.



The way Batra sees it, a screen adaptation is a series of interpretations. Payne interprets Barnes’s book, he interprets Payne’s script and the actors, in turn, interpret his direction. He says, “I’ve always felt that films should be cousins of books. Siblings can kill each other; there’s always a rivalry there. But cousins are better. It’s a more harmonious relationship.”

I ask about the ending. It’s not Barnes’s, it’s not Payne’s, so it must surely be Batra’s. The director casts his mind back; he can’t recall the exact details. He explains that Payne originally scripted a final scene that was very clever: a hurried conversation, one last revelation. “Nick did something ingenious,” he said. “But I felt it was quite a jump for the audience – and Tony – to put two and two together. It was too much, too neat, so we changed it a little. But only a little.”

So the director has the final word? “Oh absolutely,” says Batra. “The buck stops with the director. That’s the nature of the business.”

I like Batra’s description of his film as a set of interpretations; like a game of Chinese whispers in which the original message takes on different meanings as it passes down the line. Again, given Barnes’s story, this seems poetic justice of sorts. Poor Tony Webster says one thing; his former friends say another. The author tells his version; the film-makers duly rewrite it. And if the endings are different, maybe that’s fitting, too. It leaves book and film locked in conversation, two competing accounts in a state of perpetual unrest.


The Sense of an Ending is released (in the UK) on 14 April.

« Last Edit: April 02, 2017, 09:54:38 am by Aloysius J. Gleek »
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Offline Jeff Wrangler

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  • "He somebody you cowboy'd with?"
I noticed last night that Tom Rob Smith is the writer for "American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace."
"It is required of every man that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men, and travel far and wide."--Charles Dickens.

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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I noticed last night that Tom Rob Smith is the writer for "American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace."


Yup, he is, Jeff! If there is a gay story with glamorously stylish homicide and multi-episodic mayhem, he's our man, I guess.   ::) ::)
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Offline Jeff Wrangler

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Yup, he is, Jeff! If there is a gay story with glamorously stylish homicide and multi-episodic mayhem, he's our man, I guess.   ::) ::)

 :laugh:  :laugh:
"It is required of every man that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men, and travel far and wide."--Charles Dickens.

Offline CellarDweller

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  • A city boy's mentality, with a cowboy's soul.


Tell him when l come up to him and ask to play the record, l'm gonna say: ''Voulez-vous jouer ce disque?''
'Voulez-vous, will you kiss my dick?'
Will you play my record? One-track mind!

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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I just know friend Alex would have loved Counter-hunk Jakub Józef Orliński at Wigmore Hall!   :D :D :D




[youtube=1250,700]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3V1bcsHRR4[/youtube]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3V1bcsHRR4

Jakub Józef Orliński
and Michał Biel in concert at Wigmore Hall
What power art thou
From King Arthur  or The British Worthy
Henry Purcell (1659 - 1695)

Polish Cultural Institute in London
Published on Jul 20, 2018




A recital celebrating 100th Anniversary of Poland regaining Independence  #PL100


Jakub Józef Orliński, countertenor
Michał Biel, pianist



Warner Classics












LONDONSPYFANFIC





Notes:

This is a collection of four LS drabbles, two old, two new. Enjoy.




Notes:

This ficlet expands on the flashback scene of Alex tying Danny's tie.

Danny and Alex attend a performance of Beethoven's Late String Quartets at Wigmore Hall








https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wigmore_Hall

Intimate Victorian concert venue for chamber music recitals and lunchtime concerts.





Two days, two nights
Chapter 4: New Notation
By thecountessolivia
Published: 02-18-2016
Completed: 02-20-2016

http://archiveofourown.org/users/thecountessolivia/pseuds/thecountessolivia
http://archiveofourown.org/works/6050256/chapters/13904542



Summary:
Danny and Alex attend a performance of Beethoven's Late String Quartets at Wigmore Hall.



To illustrate, Alex's hands lift and tilt, fingers forming a dome. Danny watches as they perform their architectural dance, straining to concentrate on Alex's whispered explanations of the hall's acoustics.

The quickly quaffed glass of pre-concert wine is spreading its warmth through his belly. Danny feels fidgety, happy, distracted and out of place. His attention drifts to the grown-up faces of the arriving audience and he wonders if those whose eyes he meets recognise him for the suited fraud he is.

He glances down at his knee brushing against Alex's and tries not to get turned on. He obsesses again over why Alex chose today, of all days: an unremarkable Thursday evening. He longs to scratch the infuriating itch along his collarbone, just beneath where Alex's hands had earlier shaped the immaculate knot of his tie.

The same hands now join in the polite applause that begins to fill the hall. Danny turns from Alex, towards the stage, and sees the four musician take a bow beside their instruments. He's agape at their youth and their seriousness - so like Alex.

The strings begin in a drawn-out, solemn unison but soon split to dance and meander about each other. A single violin pitches above the others to form a melody and its melancholy sweetness cuts Danny through with a deep ache, as if the bow were sawing and swaying directly over his heart. He feels his face crumple with feeling and when he dares to glance at Alex he meets the same expression as his own, fixed not on the stage but on him.

---------------

The music swells, dives, dips, weeps. Danny swallows back tears and wants to hold Alex's hand. Over six months. Over six months of Alex side-stepping all the clichés Danny had always thought he was desperate for. Six months of Alex forging from inexperience a new language that Danny is only now beginning to grasp.

Their one, three, six month anniversaries drift by unacknowledged. No dirty or love-sick texts appear on Danny's phone. No expensive gifts his trashier mates tell him he should expect.

Meanwhile, Alex ties his ties. Alex stops him in mid-stride and crouches down on the pavement to redo the laces in his canvas trainers. Alex crooks his finger and lets its knuckle play absent-mindedly with Danny's earlobe. Alex carries spare socks and a spare parka on their country walks. Danny finds the hole in the sleeve of his coat mysteriously mended and the broken lamp beside his bed working again.

With a knitted brow, Alex listens silently as Danny whines about not being having been texted the day before. The following week, daily at the same time, Danny's phone buzzes on the overground home from work. Each day a new picture. A long shadow cast by iron railings. A refraction of imperfect glass. An obscure, amusing blue plaque. A murmuration of starlings above Southwark cathedral.



                         

   
100 Lambeth Road, SE1                                                                                        



Alex pulls him in by the hips when they dress in the morning, places a single kiss on the small of Danny's back then lets him go. Alex pauses when they fuck and, holding deep and perfectly still inside him, reaches down to move trembling fingertips over Danny's face, stricken as if he's seeing him for the first time or the last.

---------------

The concert crowd pours out into the rain, streaming towards Bond Street tube. They huddle in the corner, out of the way, and button up each others' coats beneath the frosted glass awning of the hall.

"So at some point you're going to tell me, right? What we're celebrating?"

"Celebrating?"

"I've been wracking my brain - it's not an anniversary..."

Alex's lips part in response. He looks worried, mouths for words. Danny clasps his hand, soothing, smoothing over his questioning.

"It's just... this seemed so special. It is so special."

"Danny... I'm sorry. I just thought you'd like the music."


« Last Edit: October 06, 2018, 11:49:54 am by Aloysius J. Gleek »
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"